According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, the “glitch” impacts an estimated 615,000 people in California, mostly women and children from low and middle-income families. The center estimates that about 400,000 of those people would be eligible for financial assistance through Covered California based on their income.
Much of the cost for increasing premiums has been swallowed by employers, but it gets passed down to employees anyway. When health costs increase, wages stagnate, said Laurel Lucia, director of health care at the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Without any action, approximately 220,000 residents would lose health insurance under the state’s individual marketplace, according to the Berkeley Labor Center.
California has been a laboratory for progressive labor measures, said Ken Jacobs. It “becomes proof of concept when a state like California puts these measures in place.”
Here’s something the unions all agree on: The labor workforce needs to grow to meet construction demands, and is struggling to do so. Pay and health coverage among the mostly non-union workforce is often so poor that nearly half of construction workers rely on the state’s five largest public safety net programs, according to a recent UC Berkeley Labor Center study.
If the state pours more money into part-time faculty health plans, “unions and the districts may negotiate to improve the benefits currently offered,” said Laurel Lucia. Colleges that already offer health plans to part-time faculty “might reduce the premium amount that the worker is required to pay or they might reduce the amount that people have to pay out of pocket to access care.”
A workplace tech accountability bill would force employers to tell workers they’re being spied on and would ban surveillance outside of work.
Lack of access because of immigration status is just one piece of the remaining uninsured. Many other Californians forgo coverage despite being eligible, likely because of the cost. According to the UC Berkeley and UCLA study, 2 million uninsured people qualify for Medi-Cal, employer coverage or Covered California.
Union workers in California are more likely to receive health care through their employers and to earn nearly 13% higher wages than nonunionized workers in similar industries, and they are 50% more likely to have an employer-sponsored retirement plan, according to a report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
Unionized workers in California earn on average 12.9% more than similar non-union workers, according to research from UC Berkeley Labor Center. They are also more likely to receive employer-sponsored health benefits and a retirement plan.
Jacobs says the current union election system gives employers significant access to workers and this bill, he says, puts the decision in the hands of the farmworkers.
“Low-income workers face significant practical challenges. They often have limited time because of multiple jobs, they may lack childcare, spend a lot of time commuting. And they’re worried about missing work, not just for the appointment but also if they have symptoms from the vaccine,” Lucia said.
“The folks who are justifiably critical of the conventional approach say it’s about train and pray — train a bunch of people in skills that you think they might want and pray that they might get hired,” said Carol Zabin, co-author of research for the UC Berkeley Labor Center that backed High Road.
Jacobs says the share of worker households who rely on Medicaid or the Earned Income Tax Credit is likely much higher in non-unionized residential construction. “These are costs that really should be taken into account when we think about, overall, what is the cost of having labor standards on construction and on affordable housing,” he said.
Studies show that if costs continued to rise only at the rate of general economic growth, the proposed Office of Health Care Affordability could save Californians billions of dollars every year.
“Business as usual” when it comes to paid sick leave won’t work in a pandemic. It’s time to extend a clear, strong and unequivocal paid sick safety net to all workers.
“The ACA covered millions of people and reduced the racial and ethnic disparities in health coverage in California,” researchers at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and UCLA Center for Health Policy Research wrote in a recent publication. “(T)o take away these coverage options especially during a global pandemic and recession would exacerbate racial and ethnic inequality in California.”
“This is an extremely dangerous precedent,” said Ken Jacobs, chair of the Labor Center at UC Berkeley. “They just acted like the law doesn’t apply to them and assumed they could bring in enough money, gain enough political power, to bend the law to their will.”
Prioritizing good jobs that also solve some of our environmental and climate issues are part of a strong economic recovery. We’re at a crossroads. The recommendations in the Jobs and Climate Action Plan for 2030 will help California emerge from this recovery stronger and more resilient than ever.
Nearly 21,000 essential workers wouldn’t have contracted COVID-19 and dozens likely wouldn’t have died if California had an adequate stockpile of personal protective equipment at the outset of the pandemic, according to a Wednesday report from UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health and Labor Center.
If the drivers had been classified as employees, Uber and Lyft would have paid $413 million into California’s unemployment fund between 2014 and 2019, a recent report from UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment found. That’s about the same amount of money as California borrowed from the federal government in April to pay a staggering number of unemployment claims.
